The game of life

When Peter Berg talks about making “Friday Night Lights,” the Odessa, Texas-based saga of Permian High School’s 1988 football season , he gets a strange gleam in his eye, the evangelical gleam of a true believer. “I went to 20 football games in Texas last year, and after about two games it becomes an addiction,” says Berg, who was such a zealot that the actor-turned-director skipped the opening night of his film “The Rundown” last fall to ride the bus with a football team from Austin, where he shot much of the film. Standing on the sidelines, Berg saw firsthand the singular fury of unhappy coaches and steely determination of eager young players.

“There’s a glow around these kids playing their senior year of football,” he says. “I’ve been to U2 concerts, I’ve seen great theater on Broadway, but nothing comes close to a real good Texas high school football game. I thought I’d become too cynical to ever say this, but on a ridiculously small level, it made me understand what it’s like to be proud to be an American.”

He quickly fixes me with a probing stare, alert for any hint of scoffing. “For any eye-rollers, I’d say go down and watch a Texas high school football game, and after you see these kids’ dedication and courage, tell me if you don’t feel the same thing.”

Berg traces his transformation to a playoff game he filmed last November in Austin. Late in the game, David Edwards, a defensive back playing for San Antonio’s Madison High, delivered a crushing tackle to an opposing receiver. The receiver dropped the ball, but Edwards never got up. The impact of the tackle had snapped the fourth vertebra in the 16-year-old’s neck, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.

As Berg tells the story, he digs a dog-eared photo out of his wallet. It shows Edwards flashing a beatific grin, looking like he could run 40-yard sprints in the sweltering Texas sun forever. Berg can’t get the moment out of his head -- seeing the crumpled body on the field as an ominous hush swept the crowded stadium. “The tears just poured out of my eyes, watching the way people came together and prayed,” he recalls. “It took 20 minutes for an ambulance to come and there was 20 minutes of silence, except for the sound of David’s mother screaming.”

Afterward, Berg felt like a man on a mission, his mission being to capture the rough justice of high school football, where, as it’s played in an economically fragile town like Odessa, winning isn’t everything -- it’s the only thing. “There was something about that injury that really seared me,” says Berg. “In this world, football isn’t a hobby. It’s perhaps the most real thing in people’s lives. And I knew I didn’t want to clown it up in any way. From that moment on, it was all business.”

“Friday Night Lights,” due in theaters Oct. 8, is adapted from H.G. (Buzz) Bissinger’s acclaimed 1990 book that focuses on Odessa and its often disturbing obsession with high school football. The book set off a storm of controversy with its frank portrayal of a community’s casual racism and skewed values. The book pointed out, for example, that the local school district budgeted more money for the Permian football team’s medical supplies than it did for teaching materials for the school English Department.

Time had not healed all wounds. Before Berg could get permission to film at Permian’s stadium, he had to write to the Odessa school board, promising he wouldn’t portray the town in a racist or stereotypical manner. At one of the Permian games he attended last fall, as Berg listened to the crowd’s trademark chant, “Mojo! Mojo!,” an angry woman appeared, wagging a finger in his face. “She said, ‘Are you gonna make us look like monsters like that guy did in that book?’ ” Berg recalls. “Almost 15 years later, people were still enraged.”

Berg knows the “guy” behind the book all too well. Bissinger is his cousin. As Berg puts it, “He’s as close to a big brother as I’ve ever had.” In Hollywood, it’s the rare filmmaker who loses sleep worrying about pleasing the author of the book he’s adapting. But when the author is your cousin and, as Berg puts it, “a tough nut -- the hardest guy to please that I know,” his concerns are not so easy to dismiss. “The movie became a big family matter,” says Berg. “But early on I told Buzzie, ‘I know the integrity you bring to your work, but you gotta let me go and do my movie.’ ”

Unlike most mass entertainment, whether it’s a Hollywood film or NBC’s recent Olympics coverage, “Friday Night Lights” isn’t slathered in emotionally gooey sentimentality. It doesn’t confront the bigger issues of Bissinger’s book -- we only catch a whiff of the town’s racism and educational neglect -- but it captures the powerful allure of football as well as the complicated emotions underlying Odessa’s high-stakes sports culture. With its blunt, uncondescending tone and small-town Texas setting, it’s hard not to compare the film to Peter Bogdanovich’s adaptation of “The Last Picture Show,” which in fact served as a model for David Aaron Cohen, who wrote the original “FNL” script and shares screenplay credit with Berg.

From Bissinger’s perspective, the movie’s getting made was something of a miracle. Shortly after the book was published, Imagine Entertainment producer Brian Grazer had bought the film rights, largely at the behest of the late Alan Pakula, who wanted to direct the film. In the course of the past 14 years, a stream of filmmakers has invaded the Permian locker room, watching the coaches diagram plays, interviewing townsfolk, even accompanying players to strip joints after the games. Overall, the project had six directors and nearly as many writers, including Pakula, “Flintstones” director Brian Levant; Richard Linklater, the Texas-born director of “School of Rock”; and “Shattered Glass” director Billy Ray, who wrote a version of the script for director Jon Avnet.

For Grazer, the ebb came when one director returned from Odessa with footage of the players, which he played at a meeting, accompanied by Eagles-type vintage rock. “He started to dance around the room to his own music,” Grazer recalls. “That was when I started rolling my eyes and thinking, ‘That’s the end of this guy!’ ”

Watching at a distance as each new effort to adapt the book fizzled, Bissinger became increasingly pessimistic. The worst moment came in 1999, when MTV Films released “Varsity Blues,” a raucous teen film about Texas high school football that stopped “FNL” in its tracks. “It was a total rip-off,” says Bissinger. “But worse, it was over-the-top Texas garbage with every cliche possible. After that, I just let go. I’d been on the roller-coaster too many times.”

By the time Berg took an interest in the project, it had been at Imagine so long that the rights to the book had reverted to Bissinger. When he heard of Berg’s involvement, he made a new deal with the company. But now it was Grazer’s time to play hard to get. He had become a big fan of Berg, who wrote and directed “Wonderland,” an Imagine-produced TV drama set in a hospital psychiatric unit that aired briefly on ABC in 2000. To Grazer, the brutally realistic show had the gritty intensity he envisioned for “Friday Night Lights,” which he saw as a companion piece to “8 Mile,” the Eminem film he produced in 2002.

“Everyone else who came in [wanting to direct] always talked about football -- they’d always get down in a three-point stance,” Grazer recalls. “Pete was interested in what it’s like to live in a tiny town and want to get out.” But Grazer and Berg’s relationship had frayed after the young director had shown interest in several other Imagine films, only to get cold feet. As Grazer told me: “He’d promised to do these other movies and [I felt like he abandoned] me. And I was thinking, if I get emotionally involved in the movie again with Pete, will I get [abandoned] again?”

Berg acknowledges that the men had issues. “There was one project in particular where I flat-out led Brian down the road and at the last minute I said, ‘I just can’t do it,’ ” he explained at dinner one night. “I’m new at directing and there isn’t a rule book about committing to projects, so you don’t know exactly how to behave.”

Finally, Grazer dispatched Jim Whittaker, an Imagine executive who’d been pushing to get “FNL” going again, to broker a peace. “I had to look Brian in the eye and say, ‘I’m not going to walk away from this -- ever,’ ” Berg says. “And in return, I asked Brian to promise we’d never change the ending or do anything to betray the book. And he’s been great, he’s backed me every step of the way.”

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STORY AS METAPHOR

If there’s one reason why “Friday Night Lights” miraculously survived nearly 15 years of missteps and dead ends, it’s that nearly all the people involved with the project saw it as a uniquely personal story, as a metaphor for something essential in their own lives. For Berg, having witnessed a young football player’s life shattered with one violent tackle, it became a portrait of the crushing burden of expectations that weigh on the young athletes playing in a win-at-all-costs culture. Even someone with as many career accomplishments as Grazer, who won an Oscar for his 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind,” still agonizes over his own youthful struggles.

“I really relate to a movie about trying to get beyond your circumstances and create your identity,” he explains. “I went to Chatsworth High, which is a long ways away from Beverly Hills. When I was 14, I was a Fuller Brush salesman. I worked in a rental yard in Chatsworth. It took me a long time to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In high school, Grazer was a good athlete, but he didn’t have the size to play football. He has vivid memories of standing among 100 other kids after a week of football practice, knowing the coach was going to cut him. “Coach Ogawa said, ‘Grazer, what’s your status here?’ And I didn’t have an answer. Of course, he cut me. It was horribly painful and embarrassing.”

Grazer went out for the school swim team instead. “I remember at our first meet I swam the 50-yard butterfly. When I finished, I thought everybody was already out of the pool. But not only did I win, I broke the city record. And that’s what I always thought about with this movie, that just one little thing can make a difference when you can finally do something good.”

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THORNTON IN KEY ROLE

When the filmmakers began casting “FNL,” they knew the movie’s pivotal role would be that of Gary Gaines, the Permian football coach. It was Gaines who held the team together during that 1988 season, even when it lost star running back Boobie Miles to a knee injury and got off to such a rocky start that the football-crazed locals, in a signature vote of no-confidence in the embattled coach, planted “For Sale” signs in his front lawn after a defeat. The part went to Billy Bob Thornton.

After watching him address the team in the locker room at halftime, saying in a hushed, emotion-laden voice that “I want you to put each other in your hearts forever, because forever is about to happen,” it’s hard to believe the filmmakers could possibly have imagined anyone else in the role, even though Berg says they offered the part to Thornton only after Tom Hanks turned it down.

The idea of playing a coach was especially personal to Thornton, who grew up in Arkansas, the son of a high school basketball coach who had the same ideas about winning that the fans did in Odessa. “My dad was very intense,” says Thornton. “When he lost a game, it was depressing around the house for weeks afterward. He once got so mad during a game he busted his knuckles on a steel pole.”

When Thornton was a kid, his dad would often sit in the family kitchen, listening to a University of Arkansas game on the radio. “If the Razorbacks lost, he’d go out of his mind,” Thornton explains. “Once, when we were playing Rice, he was making hamburgers and the game was tied 10-10. And when they scored a go-ahead touchdown, he took a spatula and he flipped one of the hamburgers at me at about 100 mph.”

Football is played everywhere, from the steel-mill towns of western Pennsylvania to the leafy suburbs of Southern California. But if you’ve ever seen a showdown between the LSU Tigers and Alabama’s Crimson Tide in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or a grudge match between the Miami Hurricanes and the Florida State Seminoles on a steamy Saturday afternoon in Tallahassee, Fla., you know that the South is where football matters the most. Bissinger says he first got the idea of writing the book on a driving trip through the South after seeing town after town with vacant buildings and shuttered storefronts but immaculately groomed high school football stadiums.

“Put it this way,” says Thornton. “When I was a boy in Arkansas, most of the kids I knew would rather grow up to be the quarterback of the Green Bay Packers than be president of the United States. It was taught to us early on that football is not just a game. There’s an honor and grace to it that teaches us and shapes us as people.”

It’s no coincidence that the South has a long heritage of spawning both great military leaders and football legends. “Football plays into the myth of what men think is toughness, strength and gutting it out, which are all qualities that are very much a part of Southern culture,” says Bissinger. “You could say it’s all the things George W. Bush wants us to believe in. In a place like Odessa, high school football becomes the great badge of identity, something you can pour your hopes and dreams into.”

Before Berg shot the film this year, he spent much of the 2003 football season in Texas, hanging out with the players and coaches at Permian High and Austin’s Westlake High School. He also visited with Gaines and many of the key players from the 1988 team. Though he had a script to rely on -- it was penned by David Aaron Cohen, the first writer on the movie back in 1991 -- Berg felt he needed to experience firsthand what it was like on the sidelines.

“What I saw was absolute chaos, with the coaches talking to these 17-year-old boys like they were soldiers,” Berg recalls. “Everything is happening at once, there’s pure desperation in the air, and 40,000 people are screaming in the stands. It was a lot like the beginning minutes of ‘Saving Private Ryan.’ ”

For Berg, the biggest hurdle was convincing Universal, which was committing $33 million to bankroll the movie, that it was getting a gripping human drama, not just a glorified football movie. Last fall, Berg invited the top brass from the studio and Imagine down to see Permian’s homecoming game against archrival Odessa High. The trip got off to an inauspicious start. “There was bad weather and our plane got diverted to Midland, so we had to take a bus to Odessa,” Berg recalls. “At the game, everyone seemed nervous. Brian was standing near an exit and [Universal Chairman] Stacey Snider didn’t seem very into it. Before the game even started, Jim Whittaker said, ‘Just so you know, we’ll probably be leaving at halftime.’ ”

But as the game progressed, with the lead seesawing, any thoughts of leaving evaporated. “By the end of the third quarter, there’s Stacey riveted, with a girl from each rival school at her side, and Brian, with rain pouring off his head, was totally possessed, screaming ‘Mojo!’ every time Permian had the ball.”

In the last seconds, Permian kicked a field goal to win the game. Jubilant, everyone boarded the Universal jet to fly home.

Fifteen minutes into the flight, the plane’s power went out. A stewardess appeared, looking stricken. As Berg recalls, “She said, ‘The pilot is going to try to land the plane. I’m going to show you the crash position.’ Then she began to pass out life preservers.” For what seemed like an eternity, Berg said everyone could feel the plane gliding down, losing altitude each minute.

Suddenly the power switched on, the engines surged back to life and the stewardess reappeared, saying, “Everything is OK -- who’d like a drink?”

There was much relief and celebration, especially on the part of Berg, who viewed the experience as the most vivid of cinematic omens. “That’s why this movie got made,” he says. “We all went down to Odessa, saw an incredibly exciting football game and then spent 20 minutes on a plane thinking we were all going to die. Let me tell you, that’s a sure-fire way to get your movie green-lit!”